President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, has been fighting radical social justice activists long before it was cool—ever since high school, he trolled people, slammed liberals, and stood for free speech.
During his time at the elite all-boys DC prep school, Georgetown Preparatory, now-$30,000-a-year private Jesuit school that is considered to be one of the most selective in the country, Gorshuch founded and led a student group called “Fascism Forever Club”, the Daily Mail revealed.
“Fascism Forever Club”, the name chosen to provoke obviously, was an anti-faculty group that opposed the “liberal” views of the school administration.
“In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever Club’ happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘eft-wing’ tendencies of the faculty,” read the yearbook.
After graduating, Gorsuch brought his early rebellious conservative tendencies to Columbia University, where he often turned to the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, to lampoon progressives and defend freedom of speech.
“He was the campus’s most prominent right-wing activist,” Jordan Kushner, a Columbia graduate who is now a civil rights lawyer in Minnesota, told POLITICO. “The political atmosphere was pretty heated at the time, and Neil made a point of staking out, basically, an activist conservative position.”
In one article for the paper, Gorsuch argued in favor of gentrification and defense research and called out protests calling for divestment from South Africa, claiming most of the targeted companies were already divesting from the country.
He then rhetorically asked why the protesters aren’t engaging with the other side of the issue. “Is it because such arguments would be Immoral, False, and Heartless? Or is it because it is not fashionable at Columbia to be anything other than a pro-Sandinista, anti-Reagan, ADHOC, uraniumpilfering protester?”
In a regular column called “Fed up”, the potential Supreme Court justice once wrote: “Our protestors, it seems, have a monopoly on righteousness. In all their muddled thinking, however, our’ progressives’ have become anything but truly progressive.”
Gorsuch mocked the student activists who “mourn for the good old days when they could shut down campus buildings at whim”, adding “In their hysteria and outrageously overdrawn analogies, the ‘progressives’ lose sight of some basic facts.”
“With their ‘issues,’ campus ‘progressives’ have tried to convince us that we have an obligation to act. They insist that they are being harassed by ‘terroristic fascists.’ But what they forget to tell us is that they are asking for special treatment, acting as a vigilante squad while avoiding the weight of their own actions,” he added.
He shined brightest when defending the First Amendmend, showing his early support for free speech. In his sophomore year, he argued that military recruiters should be allowed to recruit on campus:
Wasn’t the First Amendment written for the explicit purpose of protecting dissenting voices, allowing them the freedom to ‘recruit’ others to their opinions?” he wrote. “Don’t we call this the marketplace of ideas—implying that ideas are bought by converts and sold by believers, thus using the very language of recruitment? Free speech is dangerous to dictators because it promises to recruit opposition; effective free speech is the best recruiting policy.